Site Mobile Navigation

Ridiculed, an N.F.L. Owner Goes to Court

Back in November, when Daniel M. Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, was pilloried at length in a piece in the Washington City Paper, a local weekly, he had a number of options: He could have ignored the article, contacted the newspaper and asked for equal time or corrections, or he could have used his bully pulpit as the owner of both a pro sports team and a number of local radio stations to respond.

Mr. Snyder chose none of the above, instead commissioning David P. Donovan, the general counsel of the Redskins, to write a letter to the owners of the newspaper that included the following paragraph:

“Mr. Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation and defend himself and his wife against your paper’s concerted attempt at character assassination. We presume that defending such litigation would not be a rational strategy for an investment fund such as yours. Indeed, the cost of the litigation would presumably quickly outstrip the asset value of the Washington City Paper.”

Historically, newspapers big and small have depended on the relatively stalwart federal laws protecting First Amendment freedoms, and when that failed to deter, a good libel insurance policy and lawyers to stand behind it.

Perhaps Mr. Snyder feels emboldened to threaten as opposed to negotiate because City Paper — a weekly in Washington, D.C., that I used to edit over 10 years ago — went through bankruptcy in 2008 and now is owned by Atalaya Capital Management, a hedge fund.

Atalaya lent Creative Loafing the money to finance a purchase of City Paper, among other papers, in 2007. Libel cases are notoriously difficult to win, but as newspaper companies have been in decline, some of the targets of their reporting have begun to push back in the belief that owners are less eager to defend their work in costly ways.

The City Paper article in question was an encyclopedic litany of complaints about Mr. Snyder’s tenure that ran literally from A (for the American Enterprise Institute, which cited the Redskins as a “seriously mismanaged” franchise) to Z (for Jim Zorn, a former Redskins head coach, but here used as a verb to describe humiliating an employee by taking away his duties) and just about everything in between, including H (for Pat Hill, the down-on-her-luck 73-year-old grandmother who was sued by the Redskins when she could not afford payments for her club seat contract).

The article was an instant cult classic among long-suffering Redskins fans, but it was hardly breaking new ground. Mr. Snyder’s struggles as owner of the Redskins have been a common theme in the press since he bought the team in 1999. In 2009, The Wall Street Journal published an article suggesting that Mr. Snyder’s approach to team ownership had alienated Redskins fans, asking “Are the Redskins Losing Washington?”

“This story is very much at the core of what we do. It is well-reported, factually correct and extremely relevant to the people who live in and around the Washington area,” said Amy Austin, the publisher of City Paper. “As I told our staff, this is very much the kind of story we do well, one that requires fearlessness and a bravado that is consistent with the kind of work we have done for the past 30 years.”

The complaint itself is a kitchen sink of splendors that is short on specifics in terms of what precisely Dave McKenna’s article got wrong. The complaint does digress into the rather novel legal argument that because Mr. Snyder owns several media properties, City Paper was trying to gain a competitive advantage by maligning him.

Patricia Glaser, the prominent Los Angeles lawyer who represents Mr. Snyder, suggested that the illustration of Mr. Snyder, which showed his likeness defaced by a schoolyard scribble of horns, a unibrow and a kind of devil beard, was “blatantly anti-Semitic.” Mr. Snyder and his lawyers brought out the big guns on this charge, enlisting the Simon Wiesenthal Center to demand that City Paper apologize for the image, which it said was “associated with virulent anti-Semitism going back to the Middle Ages.”

(Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for TheAtlantic.com, called this statement “almost unbearably stupid. The image isn’t anti-Semitic, at least not to anyone who has ever gone to grade school and/or has scrawled on a magazine.”)

Neither Mr. Snyder nor his executives ever got in touch with the newspaper or its editors, preferring to try to exercise leverage on the hedge fund that owned it. The effort to cut out the middleman and apply direct pressure on the ownership reflects a level of aggression that would have come in handy on the field during yet another hapless Redskins season.

It is not, however, the kind of tactic the courts will look kindly on now that Mr. Snyder has filed a suit in New York courts seeking $2 million in general damages in addition to unspecified damages and court costs. The law, in New York and elsewhere, takes a dim view of threatening to put somebody out of business for the exercise of First Amendment rights.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“Judges want cases to get resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible,” said Stuart Karle, former general counsel to The Wall Street Journal and an experienced First Amendment lawyer. “One of the first things any judge will look at is that letter, and they are likely to be very skeptical of the motivations behind Mr. Snyder’s efforts to litigate this case.”

Mr. Snyder’s decision to file in New York, historically not a great theater for the Redskins’ endeavors, is an odd one.

“It’s curious that he chose to file in New York, which is not where City Paper is located, not where Mr. Snyder lives and isn’t where the Redskins play,” said Michael Schaffer, editor of City Paper. He then joked, “Maybe he will have better luck with a jury that’s composed of Giants fans.”

To its credit, the owners of City Paper did what any self-respecting media owner would do. They turned the threatening letters over to their lawyer, Seth Berlin of Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz. (Floyd Abrams, an eminent First Amendment lawyer, has since been retained as well.)

“I guess I was perplexed by their approach,” Mr. Berlin said of the Snyder team. He pointed out that City Paper had offered to correct any mistakes. “The whole package, the letters before, the complaint, they all seemed intended to threaten my client if they did not take a particular course of actions, including getting rid of Mr. McKenna.”

Mr. Abrams added, “This litigation is so self-evidently lacking in merit and so ludicrous on its face that it is difficult to imagine that it was commenced for any reason but to seek to intimidate.”

Ms. Glaser said efforts to cast the case as David vs. Goliath were misguided.

“Because we have something called freedom of the press, which I very much believe in, it’s very important to get the facts right. Mr. Snyder has never sued a media organization, but you can’t just accuse my client of criminal conduct and expect to get away with it,” she said.

Sports team owners, a historically entitled bunch — you don’t buy the biggest toys in town unless you feel you deserve them — are particularly sensitive to the tough coverage that goes with owning a sports franchise. And if Mr. Snyder really wanted to quash the City Paper article, the lawsuit didn’t help.

The Washington Post, which first reported the news, has run several articles about the lawsuit, and it most likely generated more coverage, more comment and more traffic than the original piece did when it was published.

In fact, the coverage was probably set off by a letter from Mr. Snyder’s lawyers asking The Washington Post to retain e-mail correspondence between Mr. McKenna and a blogger at the newspaper in hopes it would establish some kind of conspiracy, which is an odd legal tack to say the least.

The complaint manages to sound both haughty and wounded, suggesting City Paper “crossed every line of ethics and decency.” What the newspaper seems really guilty of is picking a target with a lot of time and money on his hands. It is the off-season, after all.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com; twitter.com/carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2011, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ridiculed, N.F.L. Owner Goes to Court. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe